Elon's smart enough to know it won't work -- but he's also smart enough to know how gullible his fan club is. He's discovered that he can convert bits and pieces of 1960s sci-fi novels into easy money and online adulation.

I suspect SpaceX would be putting a lot less money and effort into mitigating the negative effects of its data centers if their host states had remained red. Regulation of the AI industry is already having a positive effect, and it hasn't even been written yet :)

Whether SpaceX's current efforts will be enough to mollify their new blue overlords remains to be seen.

It's now more accurately known as Microsoft 364.

Dunno why everyone thinks Terminator is prophetic. If you want to see robots hunting people down, there's plenty of footage of that coming out of the Ukraine already, and none of it involves humanoid robots. If you want to know what getting hunted down by a robot will be like in the future, imagine a swarm of mosquitoes coming for you, except instead of trying to extract a little blood, they're trying to inject a little cyanide. No self-respecting military is going to buy expensive human-sized killbots when miniaturized ones do the job better and quicker at 1/1000th of the price.

What would Iran gain from messing with France?

I'd think Mr. Putin would have more of a motive, since France (along with most of Europe) is supporting his opponent in Ukraine and he seems to be trying to probe their resolve by "accidentally" sending drones into their airspace from time to time.

If ever there was an industry crying out for regulation, it's the AI industry. I say that not because I'm against them, but because they would actually do better in the long run if they were regulated, instead of goading other into this insane game of chicken where everybody loses when the bubble bursts.

Would you believe, so they can be used as an energy storage system?

It's actually a pretty good idea, but only if you can keep the command-and-control system secure.

Alas, it's historically been easy for people to slip into a mindset of "no hacker would ever know or care about OUR little system, because [reasons]", and use that as a justification for ignoring security concerns altogether.

Of course that's never really been the case, but now that any bozo with $200 in their pocket can just pay an AI to find every possible security hole and report back, it's REALLY not the case.

Outright hostility, you say? I can't imagine how that came about.

It's quite possible; OTOH having drones flying over our nuclear plants isn't something we should feel blase about. Maybe a drone swarm can't do much actual damage to a nuclear plant, but the fact that people are flying drones (deliberately or accidentally) in a restricted area is bad news all by itself; it suggests either complete ignorance of the law, or bad intentions.

Why not boost the ISS instead of de-orbiting it? Is it because it's just too old to keep safe for human habitation, regardless of what orbit it's in?

This month: Everybody meet Paddy! He's going to use AI to rewrite all of our legacy software for practically free!
Next month: Our AI initiative has failed, entirely due to Paddy's incompetence. Please escort him from the building immediately and make sure he never works here again.

Nah, that would be gauche. Instead, we implement the cap relativity-style, where your tax rate increases proportional to the amount of money you've made already. As you keep making money, you asymptotically approach the financial "speed of light" but can never quite get there because in order to actually reach it you'd need to earn an infinite amount of money.

vim is the reason I had to give on up using a Dvorak keyboard and switch back to Qwerty. It turns out I'm quite capable of typing text in Dvorak, but relearning the muscle-memory for all the different vim operations was a bridge too far :(

Perhaps, but in this case the real pressure comes from having to justify multiple trillions of dollars of debt, using a technology whose actual scope of applicability is much smaller than you've been leading investors to believe. You can practically see the flop-sweat at this point.